Behind every great man
by romansilence
Summary: During a boring dinner with the Roosevekts Helen muses about the time she met the formidable wife of the inventor of the automobile, Bertha Benz.


Disclaimer: "Sanctuary", its characters and background story belong to Damian Kindler and 3stagemedia. No copyright infringement is intended, no profit will be made. I did not intend any breach of privacy or disrespect for the historical figures mentioned in the story.

This story was written for the "Henry Ford" prompt on my Sanctuary Bingo – Second Round card. Ford is not my main protagonist, but I still hope that the story fulfils the tenants of the Bingo rules.

Summary: A dinner party with the Roosevelts and an homage to the 125th Anniversary of the invention of the automobile.

**xxx**

**Behind Every Great Man…**

**by**

**romansilence**

**xxx**

NEW YORK CITY, Residence of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1924

Helen was not sure how she had let herself be talked into attending the celebratory dinner the Roosevelts were giving for the re-election of Alfred Smith as Governor of New York State.

She had come to New York to smooth the way for her new Head of Sanctuary, on the side they had taken down a wyrm terrorizing Central Park. And that in turn had brought her to the dinner at the arm of Police Commissioner Richard Enright, a trusted ally ever since she had started the New York Sanctuary right after the Great War. Attending a high-profile society event was, all in all, a small price to pay for the friendship of the powerful man.

Mister Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, were gracious hosts. The conversational skills of the majority of the guests, however, were seriously lacking, and so Doctor Helen Magnus found herself extremely bored. She hid her boredom behind a bright, insincere smile as the dinner conversation flittered aimlessly from topic to topic, and finally focused on automobiles.

One young man – they had been introduced but Helen still didn't remember his name – praised the quality and superiority of German cars which elicited a loud barking laugh from the distinguished older man facing Helen. He too had been introduced to her earlier – and his name she actually did remember: Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and a legend in his own right. Helen had found him charming and intelligent. Now, she considered revising that first impression.

"German cars," he said, "you don't know what you're talking about, my young, clueless friend. Benz was still in the experimenting stage with their tricycles when I made my first long distance trip in what now is known as the quadricycle."

"Oh, how curious. I recently read in the paper that Benz and Daimler are talking about a merger of their enterprises and that they plan to sign the papers on the fortieth anniversary of the invention of the 'motorwagen'…" Helen said with confusion tinting her voice.

"I remember something like this as well," the young man said. "There was talk of January 1926, and with Daimler and Benz together the future of high-quality automobiles is secured."

Some of the other guests cringed at that remark and having read a lot about Ford's production methods and his underlying consumerist philosophy Helen was not surprised when the silver haired industrialist launched into a passionate speech about motorizing all of America. Judging by the expressions of her immediate neighbors Helen deduced that it would take a while for the man to get his point across and she allowed her mind to wander back to the day she had met Carl Benz. He was a technical genius without any aptitude for the business side of things but luckily he had his wife Bertha, a confident woman who, Helen was sure, would play a vital behind-the-scenes role in the merger talks.

-x-x-x-

Helen had met the pair at the World's Fair in Paris July 1889. James and Nikola had decided that she needed a change of scenery to get her out of the abyss of depression into which John's crimes had propelled her. In retrospect Helen admitted that she had been short-tempered and apathetic at the same time and had only given in to get James to stop hovering. Nigel had agreed to help her father to hold down the fort, or in other words, to take care of everyday business at the Sanctuary while the other two had dragged her off directly to Paris.

It had been publicized literally all over the world for months, all the wonders and marvels that would be on display. On the ferry and train ride to the French Capital James had been his usual calm self and Nikola had been bouncing off the walls of their private train compartment in excitement like a kid on a sugar-high.

Once there they had not been able to keep Nikola from climbing all over the very impressive but still unfinished steel construction of the Tour Eiffel on their first night. From then on he had been utterly irrepressible until he had seen his arch-nemesis, Thomas Edison, among the guest of one of the receptions they had attended. Nikola had run off sulking. Early the next morning an emergency telegram had called James back to London, not for the Sanctuary but in his role as consulting detective for Scotland Yard. Poor old James had needed all of his considerable argumentative powers to get her to stay in Paris and enjoy the Fair, and to her own surprise, after only a few days away from London, Helen had found herself reluctant to get back.

So, she had stayed. She had walked along the most times crowded and some times almost empty streets of the Fair ground, traveled the railway built around it. She had talked with inventors and so-called curiosities, and without aiming for it had created a name for herself as the strange English lady who was there without a male escort and was shockingly able to talk on an equal footing with most of the inventors and engineers. Helen enjoyed her notoriety; and every one of the surprisingly few unkind comments she overheard had made her think: 'If only they knew to what I have really devoted my life.'

About a week after James had left Helen had wandered through the Galerie des Machines. Aside from the small café that had served surprisingly good tea it was her favorite place at the Fair. It had held all the new inventions. The air had been saturated with smoke and the smell of diesel despite the airy, high-ceilinged architecture of the pavilion. Suddenly she had heard the scream of a woman, immediately followed by the screeching of steel. Helen had instinctively hastened her steps and followed the sound. She had had to fight her way through a ring of onlookers.

Before her lay a woman, on her side and curled as much into a fetal position as possible by the abundance of her skirts. She had knelt down and checked the woman's pulse. It had been fast, but strong. A man wearing the uniform of a French police man tried to push Helen away.

She looked up, "Step away, I'm a doctor! Fetch me a stretcher at once! And some water!" She said in flawless French.

And surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, the police men had started to obey and had cleared the area directly surrounding Helen and her patient. A young guy wearing the uniform of one of the numerous steam engine companies in the pavilion had handed over two glasses with water, both only half full due to his wild dash through the crowd. It had not taken long for the woman to regain consciousness and stand up, though she had had to rely a bit more on Helen's strength than the average observer would have been able to see.

"Check the M3, get it back upright. It needs to be checked out. Who, by God, put a log right in the middle of the fairway?" She uttered after having taken a deep drink and scanned her surroundings.

The crowd around the capsized vehicle thinned slowly, too slowly for the woman's taste it seemed. She spoke in a thick German accent that still left no doubt about her command presence. "There's nothing more to see. Accidents are a part of life, and this one told me that in future models we'll need wider tires and a system to absorb the shocks better. For now, please, let me get the M3 to my husband. He has some thinking to do."

"That… vehicle might go to wherever it needs to. You, however, need medical attention, more than I can give you out here in the open. It might be best if you had us transported to your hotel room or wherever you are staying in Paris."

The woman had not objected to Helen's commanding tone and take-charge attitude, even though she had not immediately introduced herself. Later Helen had learned just how unusual that was for the fiercely independent wife of Carl Benz. Helen's own hotel had been only a couple of blocks away from the small but homely suite of the Benz family and she had sent a valet for her doctor's bag. By the time he had returned Bertha Benz had admitted to having been short of breath and slightly dizzy lately but she had attributed it to the whirlwind of activities before and now during the Fair. Helen in the end had had to tell her that her indisposition had had less to do with stress and more with the fact that she had been pregnant.

Bertha Benz had taken it in stride; she already had four children and had only wished to return to the Fair. Helen had convinced her to rest for the day but only under the condition that she would stay and keep her company. And, dear Lord, what she had learned about the woman and her family and the intricacies of constructing and driving a 'motorwagen', and enthusiasm she now understood very well.

-x-x-x-

Commissioner Enright carefully touched Helen's hand, "Are you alright, Doctor Magnus?"

"Oh, I apologize, Commissioner, my mind must have wandered. Did I miss much of the conversation?"

"Just us fellows talking about technical things, dear lady," Henry Ford said. "I apologize if you found it boring. I know most of it is beyond the horizon of a woman's knowledge."

"I'm quite the enthusiast myself, Mister Ford. I have to apologize. I was just thinking that without a woman's courage we probably still would use horses and carriages for transport," Helen said with a disarming smile, knowing full well that her statement would be at least controversial.

"That's poppycock, dear lady, and proof that women really don't know what they're talking about when it comes to automobiles," Henry Ford retorted. "Even if I was not the first, it was bound to happen."

"That may be, my dear Mister Ford," Helen said in a calm, sweet voice that only a few of her closest friends would have recognized as anger at the man's misogynistic attitude. "But tell me, had Thomas Edison not seen the Benz 'motorwagen' at the World's Fair in Paris in 1889 would he have ever encouraged you to focus your research and inventions on something like that?"

Henry Ford's eyes widened and Helen was acutely aware that most of the other conversations at the long table had died down but she didn't care. As cultivated as the industrialist came across, in her mind, he needed a lesson.

"That's preposterous, there's no proof that such a conversation ever happened. I only was introduced to Thomas Edison after I had worked for his firm for almost five years," he retorted.

"Oh, I might be mistaken, of course, but I heard that he offered Carl Benz to buy off his patent at the Paris Fair."

Ford's hand reached for his almost empty wine glass, a nervous gesture that forced Helen to hide her smile behind her hand. After a moment he recovered and said, "Nothing but old wives' tales, I assure you. Thomas Edison would never buy anything from a German, even though times were different then. You can't have this from first hand information, dear lady. You can't have been more than a glint in your father's eyes then."

"My mother's diary gives a very precise account of the time she spent at the World's Fair in Paris that year, the year the Eiffel Tower was built. She had the pleasure to get to know Mister and Mrs. Benz and spent time with them. Besides the long distance drive Mrs Bertha Benz did the year before is widely documented in journals and papers."

Internally Helen cringed that she had to edit her memories that way but no one at the table, including Commissioner Enright would believe that she had just turned seventy-four and had really seen the Eiffel Tower built.

"Please tell us about it, Doctor Magnus," Eleanor Roosevelt said from the other end of the table. "Women behind the wheel are no longer as rare as they once were but forty years ago such an outing must have caused quite the scandal. What made her do something like that?"

"Carl Benz, according to my mother, is an inventor by heart. He is confident in his garage but he never had the courage to advertise his inventions, especially not in the beginning, with the 'motorwagen'. So, one day Bertha Benz took the car out of storage and began the sixty mile drive to her mother's residence."

"A woman alone, don't be ridiculous!" Ford exclaimed.

"Not alone, she left her daughters in the care of their nanny and took her two teenaged sons with her. The car broke down a couple of times during the drive and she needed the boys to push it over some rough spots."

"What kind of malfunction are we talking about? Were her sons apprenticed to their father?" Henry Ford suddenly sounded genuinely interested.

"Oh no, they were still in school. Let me try to remember what my mother wrote about the repairs…

"Oh yes, she had to refuel, of course, and stopped at a pharmacy to do that. The fuel line had to be cleaned but one of her hair pins did an admirable job with that. A chain broke, luckily close to a blacksmith, so she and her oldest boy had not to push too far. Oh and during this drive and back she invented brake lining and insulated a wire with her garter belt."

Helen looked at the astonished faces all around the table and continued as if she were reading from a book. "In conversation with my mother, Carl Benz emphasized that the trip had been the idea of his sons but the young men themselves, I believe they were fourteen and fifteen when my mother met them, told another story. They said that it had been their mother's idea and hers alone and that she initiated most of the repairs and even helped more than just once with the necessary pushing of the vehicle when it had turned out that the motor had not been strong enough for the numerous hills they had had to climb.

"When the people in the streets first encountered that open carriage without horses many of them were afraid. Some even saw the invention as the work of the devil. A few old men and women even made the sign of the cross when the trio passed, but the trip did what Bertha Benz had hoped it would do: it proved to everyone, including the inventor himself that his machine worked in an exemplary way, and it brought his invention over-regional, if not international recognition."

"That's such a wonderful story, Doctor Magnus, would you mind if I use it in one of my speeches to my fellow Democrat women?"

"Of course not, Mrs Roosevelt. After all it is not a story; it's documented history," Helen answered with a side glance towards Henry Ford who seemed less than pleased that he had lost control of the conversation in such a blatant way.

Ford was about to speak up again when Mister Roosevelt declared that everyone should adjourn to the sitting room and library for coffee. Helen raised her eyebrow at he archaic tradition she already had fought half a century earlier and barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes, but she didn't say anything and excused herself to use the restroom.

Helen refreshed her make-up when the door opened and the hostess came in. "Doctor Magnus, I wanted to thank you for taking the focus from Henry Ford. He unfortunately has only one topic, two if one adds that even the pope accords women more rights than he does."

"I hope that I did not overstep the mark."

"Not in my eyes, Doctor Magnus. May I ask you a more personal question? Have you ever been to Allenswood Academy on the outskirts of London? I know it's a silly question but when I was at school there almost twenty-five years ago there was a female doctor who held two lectures and she looked just like you. And if memory serves she also had your name."

Helen didn't know how to answer. She had not expected that her past would come back to haunt her on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, at least not like this. She remembered the lectures she had held at Marie Souvestre's finishing school near London at the beginning of the century quite well.

She couldn't, however, very well answer that her father had thought it necessary to send Helen to Madame Souvestre's finishing school in Fontainebleau in 1867 in a doomed effort to focus his daughter's energies away from his own profession. Little could he have known that the education she had received in France by Marie Souvestre and her lover Caroline Dussault would instead encourage her stubborn inquisitiveness and open her eyes for the love one woman can have for another woman.

"I knew the headmistress of Allenswood, Marie Souvestre. My mother was her student at les Ruches in France long before Madame Souvestre moved to London," she lied.

Eleanor Roosevelt studied Helen's face and then nodded, "We'll leave it at that but Madame Souvestre always said that if one really has to lie it should be done with a straight face."

Helen squeezed Eleanor's arm in answer and smiled back. They left together for the sitting room where the serving staff had already brought in coffee, opened the bar and offered to light cigarettes for the ladies.

**The END**

A/N: I tried to keep as close to historical facts as I could, but I still let my imagination reign. I have no idea if Henry Ford was anywhere near New York in 1924 or if he even had contact with the Roosevelts at that time. The Benz 'motorwagen 3' was presented at the Paris World's Fair but I don't know if or who of the Benz family was present. I also don't know if Bertha Benz had any input in the negotiations of Benz &amp; Cie with Gottfried Daimler. Oh, and I didn't find any documents listing one Helen Magnus among the pensioners of Marie Souvestre's first boarding school in Fontainebleau, called 'Les Ruches' which by the way means 'Bee hive'.

A/N: I know it's not a new story, but plese let me know what you think.


End file.
